Mobile communication networks continue to experience commercial growth as a result of increasing numbers of mobile subscribers and demand for advanced data transfer technologies associated with modern mobile devices and communication networks. Additionally, changes within the communication network structure, created by business mergers and regulations governing number pooling and portability, have put network communication resources at a premium. Such factors have impacted a mobile operator's ability to cost-effectively manage valuable network resources.
Particularly affected is the management of available network communication trunks to effectuate end-to-end communication. In telecommunications, a trunk is a single transmission channel between two points, e.g., two switching centers, nodes, or both. Trunk lines resources form a major source of overhead cost for communication service providers, as they typically require some dedicated electronic logical connection between two remote points. As such, operators desire to increase the number of communications that can take place via a set number of trunks, and/or reduce a number of trunks necessary to effectuate each communication.
One mechanism that has been effective in recent years to conserve logical communication resources has been the adoption of signaling networks to perform signaling and setup operations between network equipment. Each remote communication requires several initial procedures for such communication to be established. Typically, lookup procedures must be performed to identify, locate and direct communication towards equipment serving a target device. Furthermore, network resources, e.g., trunk lines or portions thereof, routing bandwidth of Internet protocol (IP) network routers, or the like, are typically reserved and/or dedicated to each end-to-end communication to ensure a particular quality of service. In early, traditionally telephony, a number of communication trunk lines had to be utilized to perform these signaling and/or setup operations for intended end-to-end communication. Signaling networks, such as the signaling system-7 (SS7) and similar variants utilized in circuit switched and/or packet-switched mobile networks, were established to bear the burden of these signaling and setup operations, allowing expensive network trunk and/or routing resources to be allocated more liberally to end-to-end communication instead. Consequently, operators were able to increase communication capacity as a result of the efficiency provided by these signaling networks.
Modern mobile operators typically work to efficiently manage signaling and end-to-end communication resources to optimize their network capacity and scalability. Increased capacity results in higher revenues for a same overhead cost, and ultimately leads to greater commercial efficiency. Therefore, operators are typically engaged in research and experimentation to discover new mechanisms for increasing such capacity and efficiency.